At Adobe’s MAX conference this week, the company had a tech demo of a neat idea: a Flash-to-HTML5 converter.

I’ve been using a new MacBook Air which Apple loaned me for review–thoughts coming soon–and it didn’t take me very long to discover that it didn’t have Adobe’s FlashPlayer preinstalled. To be honest, I wasn’t sure whether there was anything noteworthy about that–I couldn’t remember whether any Mac I’d ever used came with Flash, or whether I’d just installed it myself. In this case I did the latter (although–odd coincidence–going to the Flash download page got me an error message at first, and I had to come back later).

But as Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, the lack of Flash is a new twist in the Apple-Adobe squabble. Apple says that it’s still cheerfully supporting Flash, and that downloading it from Adobe is the best way to get the safest, most current version. Others, of course, may draw more conspiratorial conclusions. (The timing is probably a coincidence, but it’s an interesting one: The news is hitting right before Adobe’s big, news-filled conference MAX kicks off.)

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Two scary words: Microsoft Flash.

For years, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements have had a simple, appealing modus operandi: Provide a surprisingly high percentage of the features from full-strength Photoshop and Premiere with an easier interface and more features aimed at amateurs, at an affordable price. Adobe is rolling out Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9 today: They’re $99.99 apiece ($79.99 after $20 rebate) and can also be bought in a bundle for $149.99 ($119.99 after rebate). A $179.99 version ($149.99 after rebate) includes both versions, 20GB of online storage for photos and videos, and additional training materials and art.

The Elements strategy still works, and these new versions are reasonably meaty upgrades. I tried the OS X versions.

OS X versions? In the past, only certain um, elements of Elements have been available for Macs: Adobe shipped the OS X version of Photoshop Elements with the industrial-strength Bridge media management tool rather than the more consumery Organizer, and didn’t bother with Premiere Elements at all. The biggest single piece of news about the Elements 9 apps is that they’re available for Macs in forms nearly identical to their Windows counterparts.

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Does Adobe want Flash to have a long and healthy future? Sure, but as the dominant player in software used by people who design Web sites, it’s clear that it must embrace open-source HTML5 standards with at least as much energy as it gives its own technologies. Here’s a promising sign: The company is releasing an add-on pack for its Illustrator vector-drawing package that turns the software into an HTML5 authoring tool. The Pack lets Illustrator users gear up for the richer Web ahead by beefing up Illustrator’s existing SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) features and adding new support for HTML5 concepts such as CSS3 and Canvas Tags.

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ZDnet’s Sam Diaz attended Adobe’s Android Flash summit and saw a new preview of the upcoming Google TV.

More Adobe-Google synergy: Adobe has released a version of its Reader software for Android. iPhone and iPad owners have third-party PDF readers but not an official Adobe one. Adobe does say that fans of other platforms should “stay tuned,” which brings up an interesting question: In the wake of the Flash mess, will Adobe shy away from Apple’s mobile platforms or redouble its efforts to do cool things on them? I’d vote for the latter response…

John Nack is Adobe’s most eloquent, interesting blogger. Here’s his latest on the Flash-iPhone-iPad mess.

The first time I saw Flash, I was a freelancer writer getting a demo from its creators on my dining room table. I was immediately impressed. But it wasn’t yet a Web animation/video/interactivity plug-in from Adobe. The year was 1994, and the software that knocked my socks off was a Windows drawing app called FutureSplash SmartSketch. The Web, animation, video, interactivity, and ownership by large companies (Macromedia, and then Adobe) all came later.

SmartSketch was cool because it was simple, fast, and hassle-free–and as much as as the software changed once it morphed into a Web tool, it maintained those virtues for a long time. Back in the dial-up era, it was a joy; years later, it was the first technology that made Web video make sense.

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Two weeks ago, Steve Jobs published a withering memo explaining why Apple has prevented Adobe’s Flash technology from arriving on the iPhone in any form. Today, Adobe is responding in a big way. The company has launched an ad campaign in print and on the Web with an accompanying Web portal addressing Jobs’ points about Flash’s openness, security, performance, and compatibility.

Adobe’s response doesn’t match the blunt specificity of Jobs’ piece. The ads say that Adobe loves Apple (sadly, it seems to be unrequited–but it’s an improvement over “Go screw yourself, Apple“).  And for the most part, its defense of Flash doesn’t address Apple’s stance head on. Except at the end of an open letter from Adobe cofounders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke:

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On Friday, Adobe evangelist Ryan Stewart demoed FlashPlayer 10.1 for Android at a Seattle conference. It crashed repeatedly and couldn’t deal with one site (Hulu) that an audience member asked to see. Given Flash’s already-shaky reputation at the moment, it wasn’t surprising that this led to some withering comments.

Stewart has published a sheepish blog post saying he was using an interim build of the software that wasn’t up to the stress test of a public demo. The post includes an embedded video of Stewart demoing several Flash sites on a Nexus One phone. And it…works. Quite well.

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Why won’t Apple allow Flash on the iPhone and iPad? If you want to read all the reasons all in one place, check out this post. It’s by a guy who knows what he’s talking about: Steve Jobs.

The reasons, as he states them:

• Flash is closed, and Web technologies should be open
• Most of the video people really want to watch is available in iPhone/iPad-compatible HTML5 anyhow
• With 50,000 games for the iPhone and iPad, who cares if they won’t play Flash games?
• Flash is too unreliable and insecure
• Flash for mobile devices has been delayed too often
• Flash kills battery life
• Flash was never designed for touch interfaces
• Flash is an additional layer that lets developers create cross-platform apps, but at the expense of building apps that truly leverage the platforms they run on

It’s easy to poke holes in certain parts of Jobs’ arguments–for instance, he says that “iPhone, iPod and iPod users aren’t missing much video,” which will be news to anyone who’s traveled around the Web on an Apple mobile device and found more giant empty blocks than video players. And lots of people–me included–would rather have the opportunity to choose for themselves whether to use Flash and Flash content on their mobile gadgets. (It’s possible to opt for a Flash-free PC or Mac; hardly anyone does.)

Overall, though, Jobs’s piece is pretty cogent. I came away from it feeling that Apple’s stance on Flash is controlling–but not nefarious. It’s the latest in a long list of instances of Apple getting to the future a little ahead of everyone else, in ways that are problematic at first but work out okay in the long run.

I hope that Adobe responds. The company has some good bloggers, including Mike Chambers and John Nack. Unfortunately, though, the most prominent Adobe employee who blogs about Flash is an evangelist named Lee Brimelow who seems to specialize in being kinda childish. His blog is called The Flash Blog, and has included a rant that ended “Go screw yourself, Apple” and  another post which seems to criticize the iPad for not supporting Flash-based porn. I get why an Adobe staffer–especially one charged with being passionate about Flash–might be irate about all this. But Brimelow isn’t the guy to take on Steve Jobs directly.

Brimelow says that The Flash Blog isn’t the official Adobe Flash blog. Given his position with the company and the blog’s title–and the fact there isn’t an official Flash blog as far as I can tell–I understand why people might be confused.

There’s a case to be made for Flash on Apple platforms, and Adobe ought to make it–calmly, coherently, and soon. Even if it’s a lost cause. Which it is…

The saga of Flash on the iPhone may be ending–at least for now–but Google is announcing that it’s collaborating with Adobe on the Android versions of Flash and AIR. It’s not clear what that means, exactly (details are to come at next month’s Google developer conference). But if there’s one prominent phone OS with no Adobe stuff, and one with the best possible Adobe stuff, consumers will get to decide just how big a selling point Flash and AIR are. And that’s good news.

Adobe is unveiling the new version of its design ubersuite on Monday, and a couple of the new features in Photoshop look not merely cool but extraordinary–especially for a 20-year-old piece of software that’s theoretically already very, very mature.

What if Flash felt less like a browser plugin and more like a browser feature? Google and Adobe intend to try and answer that question. They’ve announced that future versions of the Chrome browser will come with an integrated version of Flash. Download Chrome, and you’ll get a preinstalled, ready-to-go copy of Flash; update Chrome, and you’ll get any available Flash updates.

I know that some folks reading this post will have an instinctive negative reaction to this idea–there are definitely those who dislike Flash enough that they want nothing to do with it. But ardent Flash avoiders are a tiny minority, judging from the fact that the vast majority of the world’s PCs and Macs have Flash installed. (They’ll be able to disable the preinstalled Flash if they want.)

Conceptually, I like the idea–but only if it makes Flash more or less transparent. Over the years, I’ve wasted a fair amount of time reinstalling and updating Flash, dealing with odd errors (like demands for more storage), and recovering from Flash crashes. If the integrated version results in a Flash that’s just there, it’ll be a good thing. And it would help make Flash more palatable in a world in which it’ll compete with open, browser-native HTML5 technologies–which is presumably part of the idea.

In related news, both Adobe and Google are working with Mozilla and other players in the browser community to build a new API for plugins–one which will allow for better integration than existing techniques. Again, good idea if it helps us forget we’re running plugins at all…

More phone software news from Mobile World Congress: Adobe announced AIR for Android and FlashPlayer 10.1, fleshing out its “everywhere but iPhone” strategy.